Your attitude to life makes all the difference. Use these attitudes to develop your capacity to be mindful, enabling you to live a more mindful life:
- Curiosity – Become curious about your experience. How do you feel emotionally? What kind of thoughts are going through your head? What does your body feel like at the moment?
- Acceptance – Acceptance doesn’t mean resignation. Mindfulness is about accepting how you feel right now, rather than denying it. Acceptance first, change comes later.
- Kindness – Bring a sense of warm and caring compassion to your moment to moment experience. Be aware of your moment to moment experience with your heart as well as your head.
- Letting go – You don’t need to try and hold on to pleasant experiences and push away unpleasant experiences. Have a sense of a light touch to your experience.
- Non–judging – Observe whatever you are experiencing as it is, rather than classifying it into good or bad, like or dislike.
- Non–striving – Allow yourself to experience whatever your experience is rather than creating a goal for some other experience and then striving to attain that different experience.
- Patience – Change takes time. Foster your capacity to be patient.
- Trust – Have confidence in the practice of mindfulness and in your inner self to guide you.
- Beginner’s mind – Nurture your sense of being a beginner rather than an expert. ‘In the beginner’s mind, there are many possibilities, in the expert’s mind there are few.’